Wait - is this for real? A large American company openly defying the anti-freedom and totalitarian content industry? In comments in the UK media, Google chairman Eric Schmidt took aim at the big content-sponsored PROTECT IP act. The PROTECT IP act is the US internet censorship (the China kind) law, which more or less takes aim directly against Google. In his criticism, Schmidt went far - very far. The content industry obviously isn't pleased.

If this also affects Google's search engine it probably affects Bing too. So at least Microsoft is affected, and it'd be awesome to see them say "we'll also fight it".

It's not an "if", it's simply not possible for Microsoft to avoid this either. Any and all US-based search engines must comply with the law and thus filter the results. This means Bing, Google, Amazon, and so on.

Having to police the search results and filter them is indeed a form of censorship, I agree with them, but there's more reasons to fight this act than just that: having to police humongous amounts of websites and search results will just create lots of extra work for these companies while the benefit is.. well, negligible; the censored sites will just change names and domains and be back, and the round starts again from the beginning. It's an endless game of cat-and-mouse that search engine providers simply cannot win.

There is after all an easier way around it: host search sites outside the U.S. The net will simply route around the "broken part". If they continue making such foolish laws it will eventually convince enough people that the U.S. and companies bound by U.S. law can not be trusted to handle any Internet infrastructure (DNS, search, etc). After all Google fought this battle in China already by redirecting to the Hong Kong site. They could do the same with the U.S.